The Coroner's Lunch (3 page)

Despite having joined the Communist Party for entirely inappropriate reasons, Siri had been a paid-up member for forty-seven years. If the truth were to be told, he was a heathen of a communist. He’d come to believe two conflicting ideas with equal conviction: that communism was the only way man could be truly content; and that man, given his selfish ways, could never practice communism with any success. The natural product of these two views was that man could never be content. History, with its procession of disgruntled political idealists, tended to prove him right.

After clawing his way through a French education system dense and overgrown with restrictions against the poor, he had finally proved that a country boy could make something of himself. He found a rare, benevolent French sponsor, who sent him to Paris. There he became a competent but not brilliant medical student. France wasn’t renowned for making life easier for those poor souls born outside its borders. It was every
homme
for himself.

But Siri was used to struggling. In his first two years at Ancienne, without distractions, he was in the top thirty percent of his class. His tutors agreed he had great promise, “for an Asian.” But like many a good man before him, he soon discovered that all the potential in the world was no match for a nice pair of breasts. He found himself in third-year pathology concentrating not on the huge blackboard crammed with its neat diagrams, but on the slow-breathing sweater of Boua. She was a red-faced Lao nursing student who sat by the window whatever the weather. He could generally tell from the sweater just how cold it was outside. In the summer, it became a slow-breathing blouse with more buttons undone than was absolutely necessary. He barely scraped through pathology and plummeted into the bottom twenty-percent bracket overall.

By the fourth year, he and Boua were engaged and sharing a room so small, the bed had been sawn short so the door could open. She was a healthy, well-curved girl from Laos’s ancient royal capital of Luang Prabang. Her family was blue-blooded Royalist from generations back. But while her parents knelt and bowed at the feet of the passing king and tossed orchid petals before him, she was in her room plotting his demise.

She had learned of the French Communist Party from her first lover, a skinny young tutor from Lyons. At the first opportunity, she set off for her Mecca. Whereas Siri had come to Paris to become a doctor, Boua was studying nursing as a pretext: she was actually in Paris to become the best communist she could be, in order to return to elevate the downtrodden masses in her homeland.

She made it clear to Siri that if he wanted her hand, he had to embrace the red flag also. He did want her hand, and the rest of her, and considered four evenings a week, the odd Sunday, and five francs a month, cheap at half the price. At first, the thought of attending meetings that espoused the fall of the great capitalist empire made him uneasy. He was quite fond of the music of capitalism and fully expected to dance to it as soon as the chance presented itself. He’d been poor all his life, a state he was hoping to recover from as a doctor. But guilt at having such thoughts eventually overtook him.

So it was that communism and Boua conspired to damage his hopes and dreams. By embracing his fiancée and her red flag, he was slowly tearing himself from the grasp of medicine. In order to pass his fifth year, he had to take several make-up exams. By the time he reached his practicum, he had two black stars on the front of his personal file. They indicated that the student therein had to be an exceptional intern if he didn’t want to be loaded on an early Airopostale flight and forfeit his sponsor’s fees.

Fortunately, Siri was a natural doctor. The patients adored him, and the staff at the Hôtel Dieu Hospital thought so highly of him that the administration asked him to consider staying on in France and working there full-time. But his heart was with Boua, and when she returned to further The Cause in her homeland, he was at her side.

On Monday, Siri walked down to the Mekhong River and stood for a while. The rains had held on stubbornly that year, but he was sure they were now gone for another five months. It was a brisk November morning and the sun hadn’t yet found the strength to dry the grasses on the bank. He let the cool dew soak his feet and wondered how long the Party’s shiny vinyl shoes would survive the next rains.

He walked reluctantly along the embankment and kicked up scents from the Crow Shit blossoms that grew there. On the far bank, Thailand stared rudely back at him, its boats floating close to its waterfront. The river that was once a channel between two countries had become a barrier.

In front of Mahosot Hospital, he sat on a wobbly stool beside the road and ate stale
foi
noodles purchased from a cart. Nothing really tasted fresh any more. But with all the diseases he’d been exposed to over the years, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference to his health. He could probably inject himself with salmonella and it would pass straight through him.

With no other excuses to delay his arrival at work, he walked between the shoebox buildings toward his office. The hospital had been put together without style or grace by the French and was basically a village of concrete bunkers. He hesitated in front of his own building before stepping inside. The sign over the door said MORGUE in French. The mat beneath it, his own personal touch, said WELCOME in English.

Only two of the rooms in the blockhouse had natural light. One of these was his office. He shared it with his staff of two, a staff that Judge Haeng rudely referred to as one and a half.

“Good morning, Comrades.” He walked into the gray cement room and went over to his desk.

Dtui looked up from her Thai fan magazine.

“Good health, doctor.” She was a solid young nurse with a well-washed but rather craggy face and a happy mouth. Her first reaction to everything was to smile, and goodness knows, she didn’t have a lot to smile about.

“I doubt whether the Department of Information and Culture would be happy to see you reading such bourgeois perversions.”

She grinned at the doctor’s comment. “I’m just reminding myself how repulsive the capitalist system can be, Comrade.” She held up a badly registered three-color print of a television star wearing a miniskirt. “I mean, can you see me in something like that?”

Siri smiled to himself and raised his eyebrows. A rocking man in the corner of the office attracted his attention. “Ah, good morning, Mr. Geung.”

The rocking man smiled when he heard his name and looked up. “Good morning, Dr. Comrade. It’s…it’s going to be a hot one.” He nodded his agreement with his own comment.

“Yes, Mr. Geung. I believe you’re correct. Do we have any customers today?”

Geung laughed as he always did at Siri’s permanent joke. “No customers today, Dr. Comrade.”

This was it. This was the team he’d inherited, the job he didn’t want, the life he didn’t expect to be leading. For almost a year, he’d been the country’s head and only coroner. He was the first to confess to his lack of qualifications and his absence of enthusiasm for the job.

The first month of his on-the-job training had been ridiculous. The only Lao doctor with a background in performing autopsies had crossed the river, allegedly in a rubber inner tube, long before Siri’s arrival. So, apart from Mr. Geung, who had acquired a massive but well-concealed body of information as that doctor’s assistant, there was nobody to teach Siri how to do his new job.

So, once he’d agreed to postpone his retirement, he set about learning his trade from a couple of slightly charred French textbooks. He brought an old music stand from the abandoned American school and used it to hold the books open while he cut and sliced away at his first cases. With one eye on the music stand, he performed like a concert coroner playing away on the innards of the corpses. “Turn,” he would say, and Dtui turned the page. He worked through the numbers as recommended by French pathologists of 1948.

He’d performed a good deal of battlefield surgery over the years, but maintenance of the living was a very different science to the investigation of the departed. There were procedures that needed to be followed, observations that needed to be made. He hadn’t expected, at seventy-two, to be learning a new career. When he had arrived in Vientiane for the first time with the victorious Pathet Lao on November 23, 1975, there had been something far more pleasurable on his mind.

After the landmark party conference of December 5th, the mood had been higher than a rocket. The celebrations were awash in vat after vat of freshly made Lao rice spirits. Cheeks were bruised from manly kisses.

The crown prince, somber from suit to countenance, had read aloud his father’s notice of abdication and, naturally, declined an invitation to join the festivities. The Pathet Lao, after decades of cave-based insurgency, had become the rulers of Laos. The kingdom was now a republic. It was a dream many of the old soldiers, in their heart of hearts, had believed would never come true.

In the spirit of jungle fighters, they moved the trestle tables out of the banquet room and put down straw mats. There they sat in circles relishing their victory. Food and drink were replenished throughout the evening by pretty young cadres in thick lipstick and green uniforms.

Siri figured he’d probably spent more of his life cross-legged on the ground than he had in chairs. He, too, was in a buoyant mood that day, if not for the same reasons as his comrades. He would have returned to his guest house and slept the sleep of the victors if it hadn’t been for Senior Comrade Kham.

The tall, gaunt senior party member took advantage of a vacant spot in the circle beside Siri and sat himself down.

“So, Comrade Siri, we’ve actually done it.”

“So it would seem.” Siri was unused to rice whisky in such volume, and he wasn’t completely in control of his mouth or the tongue inside it. “But I have the feeling we’re here to celebrate the end of something rather than the beginning.”

“Marx tells us that all beginnings are difficult.”

“Nothing you or Marx have ever known could prepare you for the problems you’ve got coming. But, hell, Kham, you certainly shut the doubters up.” He raised his glass and chinked it against Kham’s, but quaffed alone. The comrade’s eyes were couched deep in their sockets, like snakes looking out at the world.

“You say ‘you’ as if you don’t plan to be helping us with our problems.”

Siri laughed. “Comrade Kham, I’m almost as old as the century. I’m tired. I think I’ve earned my small garden and my slow coffee mornings, afternoons of reading for pleasure, and early nights with a sweet cognac to ease me into sleep.” Kham raised his glass to the Prime Minister who sat red-faced and blissfully happy in a far circle. They both drained their glasses and called for another.

“That’s odd. As I recall, you don’t have any family living. How exactly were you planning to support this decadent lifestyle?”

“I assumed that forty-six years of membership of the party would entitle me….”

“To a pension?” Kham laughed rudely.

“Why not?”

Siri always believed, always assumed, that if ever the struggle was won, he would retire. It had been his dream on damp nights in the forests of the north. It was his prayer over the body of every young boy or girl he’d failed to pull back from death. He’d believed for so long that it would happen, he took it for granted that everyone else knew it too.

Kham continued to ridicule his plan. “My old friend, I would have expected you to know better after forty-six years. Socialism means contributing for as long as you still have something to give. When you start to forget where your mouth is and dribble egg down your shirt, when you need to pack towels into your underpants to keep yourself dry,
that’s
when the State will show its gratitude. Communism looks after its infirm.

“But look at you. You’re still in sparkling health. You have a sharp mind. ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.’ How selfish it would be to deny your services to the country you’ve striven to free from tyranny.”

Siri looked across to the high circle. The President, a reformed member of the royal family, had a sweet, mascara’d soldier on either side of him and had begun to sing them a revolutionary Vietnamese song. He became the focus of attention and conversations hushed around the room. The song finished half way through the second verse when he forgot the words and the comrades erupted into cheers and applause. A small orchestra of bamboo and wood instruments started up on the stage and the conversations continued in a more dignified manner. Siri hadn’t yet been able to shed his disappointment. He waited for Kham to finish a heated conversation to his right and engaged him with more force than the man was used to.

“I take it my situation has already been discussed by the politburo.”

“It has. You’ve impressed us all with your quiet dedication over the years.”

“Quiet,” Siri took to mean “passive.” Over the past ten years, he’d ceased to display the revolutionary passion expected of him and had been shunted off to Party Guest House Number Three, away from all the policy-making and decision-taking in Sam Neua. There he tended to damaged cadres returning from the battlefields and lost touch with the zealous comrades and their politics.

Kham eased his haunches against Siri’s and put his arm around him. The doctor was himself a very tactile character but this gesture, in this situation, he considered disrespectful.

“We have allotted you a role of great responsibility.”

The words left Kham as a reward but hit Siri like a splintery wooden club across the face. He needed responsibility like he needed another head.

“Why?”

“Because you are the best man we have for the job.”

“I’ve never been the best man for any job, ever.”

“Don’t be so modest. You’re an experienced surgeon. You have an inquisitive mind and you don’t take things at face value. We’ve decided to make you the Republic’s chief police coroner.” He looked into Siri’s green eyes for a hint of pride, but saw only bewilderment. He might as well have told him he was to be the Republic’s new balloon bender or unicyclist.